Examining the Strengths and Limitations of Ethnographic Research

Ethnography offers a holistic approach to qualitative researchers in educational contexts and appeals to scholars who wish seek to reveal rich narratives through their immersion in specific domains. This review paper examines the mobilization of the ethnographic research approach reported in studies from two distinctive learning contexts: an elementary school and a vocational college. Employing the specific evaluative criteria of Punch (2005), the desk-based study draws on existing literature to document the strengths and limitations of ethnographic method and reportage to reveal edifying insights to novice and experienced qualitative researchers who may be contemplating an ethnographic study in the future. The review reveals how extensive ethnography lends itself well to presenting thick descriptions in rich narratives to demonstrate high veracity. In contrast, this research approach may be limited in its verisimilitude, especially if ethnographers abridge their methodological and analytical descriptions and fail to acknowledge reactivity

Why I Review Unimpressive Books

Unimpressive books fail to make effective, distinctive, or otherwise substantive contributions. Yet their reviews can be useful to potential readers (as caveats), to publishers (as quality-control checks), to authors working on similar book projects (as models of what to avoid), and even to the reviewers themselves (as exercises for developing connoisseurship within a specific field). By articulating the implications and transferability of evaluative criteria, this essay explores the value and utility of such reviews.

Consumer Job Journeys

This article introduces the consumer job journey as a more holistic perspective by which to understand consumption journeys undertaken to acquire and use goods and services. It aids scholars and managers by helping make evident some key consumer decisions and behaviors that otherwise would be invisible. Four tenets lay the foundation for the concept of a consumer job journey, establishing some key differences relative to a traditional perspective on consumption journeys. A consumer job journey involves a sequence of goal-directed steps (and associated evaluative criteria) in pursuit of an overall job and the consumer actions directed by these steps to acquire, assemble, and integrate market and nonmarket resources. Propositions highlight the consumer’s role as an active project manager who continually adapts their resource configuration given job journey goal priorities, psychological tensions, and disruptions. In combination, the tenets and propositions highlight both research gaps and unique managerial implications.

Criteria for Good Qualitative Research: A Comprehensive Review

This review aims to synthesize a published set of evaluative criteria for good qualitative research. The aim is to shed light on existing standards for assessing the rigor of qualitative research encompassing a range of epistemological and ontological standpoints. Using a systematic search strategy, published journal articles that deliberate criteria for rigorous research were identified. Then, references of relevant articles were surveyed to find noteworthy, distinct, and well-defined pointers to good qualitative research. This review presents an investigative assessment of the pivotal features in qualitative research that can permit the readers to pass judgment on its quality and to condemn it as good research when objectively and adequately utilized. Overall, this review underlines the crux of qualitative research and accentuates the necessity to evaluate such research by the very tenets of its being. It also offers some prospects and recommendations to improve the quality of qualitative research. Based on the findings of this review, it is concluded that quality criteria are the aftereffect of socio-institutional procedures and existing paradigmatic conducts. Owing to the paradigmatic diversity of qualitative research, a single and specific set of quality criteria is neither feasible nor anticipated. Since qualitative research is not a cohesive discipline, researchers need to educate and familiarize themselves with applicable norms and decisive factors to evaluate qualitative research from within its theoretical and methodological framework of origin.

DEVELOPING AN INTEGRATED MODEL FOR EVALUATING R&D ORGANIZATIONS’ PERFORMANCE: COMBINATION OF DEA-ANP

Assessing the performance of the Research and development (R&D) organizations to achieve higher productivity, growth, and development is always a critical necessity. Therefore, developing a more accurate model to evaluate the performance is always required. For this purpose, this study is aimed at developing a decision-making model for evaluating R&D performance. The model comes up with determining the most proper evaluative criteria for assessing R&D organizations. Then, it integrates Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with Analytical Network Process (ANP) to assess R&D performance. This paper is aimed to develop an integrated model for evaluating R&D performance. The findings of the study show that the DEA-ANP model is an accurate and acceptable model for evaluating R&D organizations’ performance.

1. Defining the Constitution?

This chapter identifies evaluative criteria that readers may wish to keep in mind when considering the description and analysis of the United Kingdom’s current constitutional arrangements presented in the rest of the book. The chapter begins by exploring what we might regard from a contemporary perspective as the essential features of the governmental systems adopted in a ‘democratic’ state. In order to illustrate the very contested nature of this concept of ‘democracy’, the chapter presents and analyses several hypothetical examples of what we might (or might not) regard as acceptable forms of governance, and explores the the notion of a country’s constitution being properly described as as a social and political contract formulated by its citizens. The chapter concludes by examining briefly the solutions adopted by the American revolutionaries to resolve the constitutional difficulties they faced when the United States became an independent country.

CRITERIA, INDICATORS AND LEVELS OF FORMATION OF THE ECONOMICS TEACHER’S METHODOLOGICAL CULTURE

University education has all the opportunities for the formation of methodological culture of future teachers of economics as an important characteristic of their professionalism. However, practice shows that not all of them are used to overcome the contradiction between the promising tasks of training a creative specialist and the reproductive nature of the methodological training of teachers of economics. To overcome it, a mechanism of methodological growth is needed for each student, who should be involved in active methodological activities, help to achieve positive growth dynamics of his methodological culture through the realization of goals and tasks that constantly complicate and affect the accumulation of his methodological experience. The success of this process is determined by how clearly students imagine the final product of methodological training in the form of positive dynamics of growth of the level of their methodological culture. The article is aimed to the theme of formation of the future economics teacher’s methodological culture. In accordance with certain structural components of the economics teacher’s methodological culture (motivational-valuable, content-procedural, intellectual-emotional, reflexive-evaluative) we determined the levels of formation of the economics teacher’s methodological culture, the criteria (motivational-axiological, semantic-operational, creative-emotional, evaluative criteria) and the corresponding indicators of this complex personal formation. In connection with the above we can state that the methodical culture of the teacher of economics combines in its content all aspects of methodical activity, methodical baggage of personality, methodical actions and solving methodical problems, without which there can be no optimal professional achievements of the teacher of economics, his innovative actions. methodical sphere of teaching activity. Methodical culture is manifested in two ways: on the one hand, it is an ideal structure that reflects the teacher of economics about the organization and implementation of methodological activities, indicates the readiness of the teacher to fully participate in methodological activities, providing sustainable interests, values, methodological competencies. type of professional pedagogical activity; on the other hand, is a measure and a way of his creative self-realization in methodical activity.

Incorporating the public interest in public-private partnerships in Ontario: a case study of the Eglinton Crosstown

Although the Province of Ontario sees Public-Private Partnerships (P3s) as an effective means to procure major transportation infrastructure, the public interest implications of P3s from a planning perspective are little understood. P3s are purported to deliver cost-savings to the public sector through transferring expanded elements of risk to the private sector. However, critics argue that P3s erode the public interest through reduced project transparency, weakened public participation, and higher life-cycle project costs. Through a case study of the Eglinton Crosstown transit line in Toronto, this paper evaluates the extent to which the public sector agency, Infrastructure Ontario (IO), has been able to fulfill a series of evaluative criteria grounded in the public interest. Although IO has been able to maintain the public interest in the case of the Eglinton Crosstown, a lack of consistency in project transparency and weakened ex post reporting standards hampers the ability of the agency to consistently uphold the public interest in present and future projects